Its not really a strategy game with so many random things tossed in. You can turn off supply pods and marvels at least.

The artifacts you can get from destroying alien nests can give you some bonuses that provide you with a rather massive advantage. So you have no choice but to focus on getting to them before your rivals do, and of course this agitates the aliens forcing you to have to fight them everywhere.

Explorer sites are the same way. Some give you a bonus in affinity level, which makes your military units massively more powerful, and thus you could easily overwhelm others straight away.

It is impossible to explore the ocean early on because krakens can appear and instantly kill you in one hit at anytime. Some games have few if any, and others have them all over the place. An option to turn off certain types of aliens, or only make them appear later on in the game, or to eliminate them entirely if you want to just go up against an AI straight away, I think would be great options to have.